Electronic database systems are often utilized to organize and store various amounts of digital data for retrieval at some later date. In order to locate data stored within an electronic database system, users often formulate queries containing various search criteria that define the scope of the database search to be performed. For convenience, certain database application programs allow users to create and save queries, rather than requiring the queries to be reformulated prior to each execution. Although this may be useful for queries that may be executed multiple times, these saved queries typically contain fixed search criteria and are stored as part of the database application program. As such, these saved queries may work well with traditional structured electronic databases that contain consistent data sets, but prove to be limited when applied to electronic document databases.
An electronic document database is a special type of electronic database that indexes electronic representations of physical documents. Electronic document databases typically allow searching of the electronic documents contained within the database based on the full textual content of each document as well as additional structured information known as metadata. Queries formulated for searching electronic document databases often contain search criteria specific to document content, as well as document creation date and/or time ranges. Thus, such document queries are content, date, and time sensitive, and prove to be less useful when stored as part of a database application program rather than part of the database itself.
Other limitations with queries saved according to methods known in the art include the distribution and reuse of saved queries. Typically, a special mechanism, independent of the database, must be used to share queries between users of a database system. Such mechanisms often have problems controlling user access to the saved queries, thereby allowing inappropriate user access to the saved queries. Furthermore, queries saved according to methods known in the art do not provide users the ability to search for other existing saved queries that may be better suited to user's search than the user's own query.